He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal; but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after all, the straightest way to his end.
“You find the work interesting? I’m sure it must be. You’ll think me very ignorant—my husband and I came here so seldom…I feel as if I ought to know so much more about it,” she explained.
At last the note for which he waited had been struck. “Won’t you try to—now you’re here? There’s so much worth knowing,” he broke out impetuously.
Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. “I’m very stupid—I’ve no head for business—but I will try to,” she said.
“It’s not business that I mean; it’s the personal relation—just the thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don’t suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred women working in them, and there’s so much to be done, just for them and their children.”
He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. “I have always understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything–-“
Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. “Do you leave it to your little girl’s nurses to do everything for her?” he asked.
Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her dignity. “Really, I don’t see—” she began with distant politeness; then her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before her lips.
“I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything–-“
Amherst’s resolve had been taken while she spoke. He would point out everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of personal prudence were flung to the winds—her blush and tone had routed the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again be given him—that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.
But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and intricate situation?
“Mrs. Westmore,” he said, “there’s no time to say much now, but before we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight,” he added, meeting her look of enquiry, “because later—tomorrow even—I might not have the chance. There are some things—a good many—in the management of the mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn’t see as I do. I don’t mean business questions: wages and dividends and so on—those are out of my province. I speak merely in the line of my own work—my care of the hands, and what I believe they need and don’t get under the present system. Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn’t have had this chance of putting the case to you; but since it’s come my way, I must seize it and take the consequences.”
Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly, that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade. And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect Truscomb’s removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager’s place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in sympathy with the awakening social movement—a man sufficiently practical to “run” the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman’s standpoint, all Amherst’s enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that were making in some of the English and continental factories. His strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see before him as the sequel to his factory-training.
All these thoughts swept through him in the instant’s pause before Mrs. Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness: “Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me—and if there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better.”
“I’ll show her, and Truscomb shan’t turn me out for it,” was the vow he passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of the main building.
How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the machinery.
Amherst’s zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the operatives’ faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him—he felt a beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms—all these varying subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines which fed the giant’s arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a responsive rush of life.